Of course, it is not just YouTube that cannot be trusted (which is why when I link to video content I expect YouTube to take down at some point, I tend to download it & upload it to BitChute), but this is a prime example of why.
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“Another way to think about Elon Musk’s relentless attacks on Starmer – and apparent desire to see him out of office before the next election – is that he recognises the opportunity Britain presents, if it can only get its house back in order.” – Marc Sidwell, CapX. January 10th, 2025 | 23 comments
 On 14 June last year, just prior to the UK General Election, I noticed parallels between the Labour Party and its stated aims and how matters unfolded after that party won power in 1964 under Harold Wilson. An important event was the sterling crisis of 1967. And this week, we read of how the yields on UK government bonds (gilts) have soared – which means investors are far less confident in the country’s creditworthiness. UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, now dubbed in certain quarters as “Rachel from Accounts” due to her questionable background details, is in China at the moment (interesting destination), and there is talk of how the UK might need to be bailed out by the IMF as it was in 1976. Even if this does not come to pass, the descent of this government has taken place with tremendous speed. We could be headed for a sterling and government debt crunch; there is widespread and justified anger about its handling of criticisms about the “grooming gangs” saga; the questionable decision to hand over the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius looks worse by the day; the government is going after private schools and educational rigor more generally; one in five working-aged adults are economically inactive….and on it goes. We are not out of the first half of January yet. “Hard pounding, Hardy”, as Nelson said at the Battle of Trafalgar.
January 10th, 2025 | 12 comments
Holman Jenkins Jnr, an opinion columnist in the Wall Street Journal, reflects on the mix of bad faith, moral cant and low protectionist nonsense that underpins so much Western policy on electric vehicles:
Jenkins also refers to the concept of “permission structures” and the malign legacy of the Obama administration. (He links to this article at The Tablet.) I like that term – it coheres with concerns about how an “administrative state” has evolved over the decades to impose policy outcomes at a remove from democratic oversight or the sharp and corrective blast of free market competition. Worth a read. The UK’s Institute of Economic Affairs, the think thank, has recently opined about “mission-directed governance”, which is a sort of automated paternalism (I discussed this offline with Paul Marks of this parish). The IEA piece links to an interesting paper about East Asia and forms of authortarianism. Update: From Guido Fawkes today: The UK’s electricity grid came worryingly close to blackouts yesterday – just 580 MW shy of the lights going out – in what independent energy consultant Kathryn Porter described as the “tightest day since 2011 or before”. National Grid ESO had to issue its first Electricity Market Notice of the winter, along with a third Capacity Market Notice, though the latter was quickly binned. No surprise that cold weather means more heating and energy… A sharp drop in wind output combined with limited electricity imports from Europe left the grid scrambling to keep the lights on. Yet Red Ed is still pushing to fast-track planning permission for a wave of new wind farms — despite the inconvenient truth that these turbines have to be switched off when there’s too much wind and the grid can’t handle it. Meanwhile Labour is ploughing ahead with their plan to make wind and solar the backbone of our energy system to hit 95% renewable energy by 2030. January 8th, 2025 | 17 comments
Further to my previous post, I was pleasantly surprised to see this comment by “MJuma2018” to a Guardian piece called “A new era of lies: Mark Zuckerberg has just ushered in an extinction-level event for truth on social media”:
What’s so surprising about that comment? The fact that it has been up for four hours despite including the words “Hunter Biden’s laptop”. My most recent attempt to mention Hunter Biden’s laptop on a Guardian comment was on 6th November 2024. It was instantly deleted, as was any comment – however polite, however on-point – containing any combination of those three words over the four years since the controversy began. I presume this was automatic. Comments that referred to the Laptop from Hell using circumlocution were also inevitably deleted after a slightly longer time, with the phrase, “This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.” I relieved my feelings by immediately following up my deleted comment with this one,
It was deleted too, of course. Dunno what quality to melt the censor’s heart MJuma2018’s comment had that my very similar one of two months ago lacked, but I am glad to see someone at Guardian Towers woke up. January 7th, 2025 | 11 comments
The Guardian reports,
A reminder that on February 8th 2021, Facebook’s own blog announced:
Emphasis added. On May 21st 2021, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s “VP Integrity” posted an update reversing the above:
The first of the claims that were described as “debunked” in the earlier post and banned from being made on Facebook, that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured”, is now the mainstream view. The next claim, about vaccines (vaccines in general, not just Covid-19 vaccines) not being “effective”, is a matter of degree. Some vaccines are more effective than others, which means that some vaccines are less effective than others. Turning to the third claim, for some categories of people, particularly children, it was indeed safer to get Covid-19 than the vaccine against it. The fourth claim is the only one that I would confidently say is simply false. Obviously, my confidence in its falsity, previously close to 100%, has been damaged by that claim being bracketed in with other claims that were described as obviously false and debunked by experts, but which have turned out to be probably true. When Zuckerberg said that the “fact-checkers” he hired “have destroyed more trust than they’ve created”, he was right. Censorship always destroys trust. Better late than never in admitting it. January 7th, 2025 | 17 comments
“The legitimacy of altering social institutions to achieve greater equality of material condition is, though often assumed, rarely argued for. Writers note that in a given country the wealthiest n percent of the population holds more than that percentage of the wealth, and the poorest n percent holds less; that to get to the wealth of the top n percent from the poorest, one must look at the bottom p percent (where p is vastly greater than n), and so forth. They proceed immediately to discuss how this might be altered.” – Robert Nozick, noting how the presumption of equality of wealth as a just default position is widely held and rarely challenged head-on. Anarchy, State and Utopia, page 232. The book’s second section, in which Nozick demolishes egalitarian ideas about equality and what he calls the “patterned” approach to justice in holdings, is in my view the best bit of the book, and enduringly influential on many classical liberals, libertarians, etc, to this day. The book was published in 1974, and Nozick was a Harvard academic at the time. (Proof that the 1970s was in some ways a fertile time for good ideas, and Harvard was in better shape than today.) January 5th, 2025 | 37 comments
I wanted something light-hearted for my first post of 2025. Instead, you get this list of Samizdata posts going back more than eleven years. The topic of all of them is the same: rape gangs in Britain whose ethnicity has been described variously as “Asian”, “South Asian”, “Pakistani” and “British Pakistani”. Their religion is Muslim. From 2022: Rotherham 1400, Telford 1000 From 2020: “With it being Asians, we can’t afford for this to be coming out.” From 2018: Grooming gangs in Rochdale and Rotherham raped with impunity and you won’t believe why! From September 2014: Want to blame someone for Rotherham? Lets start with the Guardian… From August 2014: Politically correct evasiveness fails on its own terms From 2013: If you do not want to see the BNP vindicated, try not proving them right And I will finish by quoting the late Niall Kilmartin from a 2022 post that was mostly about something else:
January 4th, 2025 | 76 comments
…it’s now illegal to build reasonable sized houses on a decent garden. Minimum density rules mean you just can’t. What was considered a “Home for Heroes” in the 1920s is illegal to build in the 2020s. Sorry, but that really is it. January 2nd, 2025 | 30 comments
January 1st, 2025 | 13 comments
The last day of the year is often a time for regrets.* However great our achievements, there are always things that we could have got done during the year but just – somehow – didn’t. Or we did them, but embarrassingly late. Peter Hague extends the idea to humanity as a species:
The comments to that tweet add stirrups, wheelbarrows, moveable type, long-distance signalling and many other inexplicably delayed technological advances to the list of missed opportunities. Bah humbug to the lot of ’em. A load of pointless whining about trivialities. If you ask me what things humanity has to reproach itself for not having invented earlier, I robustly answer, “Zero!” *Or it bloody well ought to be, anyway. If you are capable of going to a New Year’s party and drunkenly singing “Regrets, I’ve had a few / But then again too few to mention” and not immediately mentioning a long list of regrets, buzz off back to your home planet and leave us humans to enjoy ourselves in our own fashion. December 31st, 2024 | 37 comments
About a week ago or so the Reform Party (est. 2022) claimed that it was about to overtake the Conservative Party (est. Mists of Time), in terms of membership. It even put up a ticker to demonstrate this. On Boxing Day, the ticker ticked over to the magic number of whatever it was and Nigel Farage, drank some beer in a field. I was rather cynical about the numerical accuracy of this – political party membership is a weird and wonderful thing – but I had to admire the low cunning involved. The Conservative Party is in deep trouble. It governed very indifferently for a very long time. It made promises it not only did not keep but had no intention of keeping. And the result was that at the last general election the electorate gave it a thoroughly deserved kicking. But despite all this it has one thing going in its favour: size. It is very difficult for a new party to succeed in British politics. They get squeezed out by the big boys. This is a reason – perhaps the only reason – Steve Baker is still a member. So for Reform to be able to claim that in one respect – and it need only be one – that it is in fact bigger than the Conservative Party matters. It chips away at the edifice. And there it might have ended. But Kemi Badenoch – the Conservative Party’s new leader – just had to stick her oar in.
This just may win the award for the world’s worst tweet. In less than 140 characters she has:
I have been generally pro-Kemi since she first gained attention on this blog. She quotes Thomas Sowell. She seems to be prepared to confront the blob. But her first few months as Conservative leader have been… underwhelming. She hasn’t outlined a bold new vision. She hasn’t sidelined the crypto-communists in her own party and my understanding is that there is very little to write home about when it comes to confronting the Prime Android in Parliament. This is not necessarily the end of the world. I once asked one of Margaret Thatcher’s staff what she had been like as leader of the opposition. “Dreadful” came the answer. But then the Labour government of the 1970s with its strikes, inflation and financial crises did most of her campaigning for her. But this time is different – well, not in the dreadful Labour government sense. There is serious competition for the position of Alternative Government. And that competition has only got more intense. December 29th, 2024 | 24 comments
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